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Aalk4308 | 4 years ago

Amen ravenstine. "A tool that stays out of your team’s way" is quite literally the tagline of the Trello-for-devs product I'm working on (Constructor, https://constructor.dev/).

As to the article, I agree with a lot of the author's points. The author talks about lack of features for collaboration. and I agree. What's wrong with the comment systems in Trello or Jira? I think it's that they don't model how people actually collaborate, which often goes something like this: (1) I have a question for someone else on the team, (2) that person answers or passes it to someone else who can, (3) repeat until I've got the answer, (4) reflect the answer somewhere (designs, description, etc.), (5) consider the matter resolved. Many of these might be going on in parallel, and the back-and-forth is often asynchronous. A single comment stream just doesn't lend itself to this kind of collaboration. Neither does Slack where, as the author says, requests for follow-up easily get lost.

The extreme flexibility of the "circles" is interesting. On the one hand, it's nice to give control over to the users and let them model whatever use case they have. On the other, a tool that's too open-ended may overwhelm users with options when they should really be focusing on dev. (Of course, that could be solved with intelligent default templates, or something along those lines.) I'm curious to read others thoughts about that.

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qudat|4 years ago

> On the other, a tool that's too open-ended may overwhelm users with options when they should really be focusing on dev.

Author here. I agree. A big concern is I build this flexible system and a user jumps in to use it and sees a blank screen. No story section, no sprint section, no epic section. They get bewildered and end up not using it. Do you have any other thoughts on how to combat users being overwhelmed by a blank screen? I could have templates that people could "load" that would set a project up like a traditional project mgmt solution would?

Aalk4308|4 years ago

Yeah, templates for "traditional" structures sounds reasonable. Or along the same lines, it might be sufficient to have purely illustrative versions of those setups ("here's how some teams have used this"), to get the idea across, even if they can't be "loaded" as a template.